The Gospel of Isaiah: Ch. 55:8-9, Exploring the Heights
The Gospel of Isaiah: Ch. 55:8-9, Exploring the Heights.
WANTED: An imaginative scribe who can write exquisite poetry. A faithful, articulate believer in Yahweh who can switch from one extreme to another at the Lord’s command… from a sublime vision of God’s glory, to a ridiculous demonstration of shameful nakedness; from confronting the people over their sinfulness, to comforting people with hopefulness; from being an outspoken messenger one minute, to a living object lesson the next; from having one foot in the immediate surroundings one minute, to one foot in the future messianic realm the next. Must be adaptable, thick-skinned, and extraordinarily brave. Person who answers, “Here I am. Send me!” will be especially considered. (from The Jerusalem Post, 740 BC).
“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways My ways, declares the Lord Yahweh.
As high as the sky is above the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways,
and My thoughts than your thoughts.” (55:8-9).
Exploring God as the Final Frontier. It seems like Isaiah is begging us to explore God as mankind’s final frontier. To explore a frontier means to investigate uncharted territory, to seek something where settled territory is at the edge of wilderness. To explore a frontier is to search the extreme outer limits of something for knowledge and understanding, and to detect something unknown or unexplored. Every adventurer knows that an exploration like this often leads to discovery of something new and unexpected. What could be a better subject of exploration than the unimaginably immense Person of Creator God?
A Job Description. Adventurers who want to explore creation’s Final Frontier, the greatest Wonder of the World; must be extremely curious about the nature of God’s Being; motivated to know more about God than you know presently; inspired by the thrill of discovery; need to be challenged and changed in the process of exploration; have the courage to step into a safe unknown; able to invest considerable mental energy to pursue life inside God with a mustard seed of trust in Him; be comfortable with the certainty of endless exploring; have the patience to pursue the quest one step at a time for as long as it takes; must explore with the vision of C. S. Lewis in his Narnia tales, “Further Up and Further In!” Jesus beckoned His first disciples by asking them to imply follow Him. When they asked where they were going, He said merely, “Come and see!” The follower of Jesus requires the adventuresome spirit of the hearty explorer.
The Scope of the Exploration: The Subject of the exploration is far beyond even the imagination of the explorer. Even eternal heaven will not provide enough time or space to explore God. Even if we impossibly reach the limits of eternal time, there will be more to explore about God. Even if we somehow have discovered the outer fringes of God’s presence, there will be more than enough Being in which to explore His essence. Even within an everlasting timespan and the most immense cosmos imaginable, we would find it literally impossible to discover the full dimension of every aspect of God’s Being. Once started, we would never be able to exhaust our Final Frontier, we will never reach the end of our adventure. No boundary or border exists in the expanse of God’s Personhood; There will always be more to explore, even if eternity somehow came to an end, always more of God to discover even if we found the furthest of the 100 million galaxies. The joys of the everlasting Kingdom will include the ongoing exploration of God to our heart’s content, and the excitement of discovering more of Him around every corner. There will always be more to discover, which is fine because we will have all the time we need.
For my thoughts… For as the heavens… What is the context for God’s comment that His thoughts and ways are profoundly higher than mankind’s? God is all-powerful and all-knowing, and we aren’t. Let’s face it, there is God and then there is everything else. So of course His understanding and His actions will be unspeakably higher than ours. Isn’t that obvious? But what was the Lord specifically talking about in verses 8-9? The clue is in verse 7, the topic is mercy and compassion and forgiveness. His merciful ways and His compassionate actions will not be understood by us mere mortals. God’s ways are counter-intuitive to man’s. Theologians, and the rest of us, can only wonder at statements like this, “Mercy rather than justice is the outstanding attribute of God.” (Abraham Joshua Heschel). The fact that God seems to have unlimited grace will puzzle us humans. The fact that He will eternally forgive wrongdoers will mystify us. The fact that He has no boundaries when it comes to His mercy will cause us to scratch our heads and acknowledge God’s vastly different way of doing things. The distance between God’s mind and our mind is like the distance between the heavens and the earth.
The Sky’s the Limit. How distant is that, actually? We now estimate that the distance between the earth and the edge of the observable universe is 46 billion light years, making the diameter of the observable universe about 93 million light years. Scientists have determined at this point that there is very little curvature of the universe. The universe is almost perfectly flat, which means the universe is essentially infinite in size. So when the Creator of the universe says that his thoughts and deeds regarding mercy are as different from man’s as the distance from the heavens to the earth, we should sit up and take notice. So it’s true then that God’s way of thinking about forgiveness is as distant from a human’s way of thinking about forgiveness as the distance between the universe and the earth. At a minimum, that’s about 46 billion light years’ distance. At a maximum, God’s thoughts on mercy are an infinity in distance from man’s thoughts. Maybe at some point we will fully understand Father Patrick Henry Reardon’s observation, “Mercy is the cause and reason of all that God does. God does nothing, absolutely nothing, except as an expression of His mercy. God’s mercy stretches out to both extremes of infinity. All we will ever discover of God will be the deepening levels of His great, abundant, overflowing, rich, endless mercy.” (from Reardon’s book, Christ in the Psalms).
Unlimited Mercy. Man’s mercy is stingy, conditional, inconsistent, tends to be self-serving, and often depends on the worthiness of the person being shown mercy. Man’s mercy includes words like inexcusable, unforgivable, irredeemable, disgraceful. But God’s mercy is the opposite of all that, and is nothing even remotely like man’s mercy. God’s mercy and man’s mercy are like night and day… No, it’s even more different than that. God’s mercy and man’s mercy is infinitely distant from each other. God shows mercy in an infinitely different way than man. God’s quality of mercy is a universe apart from man’s. God is infinitely more merciful than man, so much so that man cannot even hope to understand the depths of God’s mercy, unless you are looking at Jesus. God’s mercy is beyond human comprehension, but because of Jesus is now up close and personal. God’s lovingkindness breaks the mold, and now, since we’ve seen it in action through Christ, we can thirst for that mercy in a world devoid of authentic love.